Israeli Pullout Begins Amid Palestinian Cheers

Israel launched its West Bank redeployment cautiously Wednesday, pulling dozens of Israeli police officers out of the northern city of Janin as Palestinian onlookers cheered.

Neither ceremonies nor violence accompanied the withdrawal of the police. Palestinians danced in the streets and welcomed the five uniformed Palestinian liaison officers who arrived on the outskirts of town to begin coordinating the city’s hand-over with their Israeli army counterparts.

Both Israelis and Palestinians said that the largely symbolic police evacuation was an appropriate start for what promises to be a far different redeployment--both in pace and scope--from Israel’s sudden pullout from most of the Gaza Strip in May, 1994.

“We learned from the mistakes we made in Gaza,” said Shlomo Dror, spokesman for Israel’s civil administration, the military bureaucracy that runs the West Bank.

Because Gaza was so isolated from most of Israel and home to only a few Jewish settlements, it turned out not to be a significant problem when the two security forces were forced almost overnight to stop treating each other as enemies, Dror said.

“But the West Bank is different. Here, it is enough for one policeman--Palestinian or Israeli--to start a fight for the whole situation to blow up.”

Faced with a West Bank uneasily shared between 1 million Palestinians and more than 120,000 Jewish settlers, the two sides have devised a city-by-city redeployment, giving their special security coordinating teams several days of overlap in each town before the army finishes its pullout, Dror said.

In Janin, Israeli troops will continue to guard the police station until they formally hand over responsibility for security to about 1,000 Palestinian police, a transfer now planned for Nov. 14, Israeli officials said.

Over the next two months, redeployment will roll gradually from north to south. By the target finish date of Jan. 1, Israeli soldiers will have vanished from six West Bank towns and 400 villages.

But even then, Israeli troops will control about two-thirds of the West Bank. They will continue to guard enclaves of Jewish settlers living in the heart of the Palestinian town of Hebron. The West Bank will be divided into three zones. The Palestinians will fully control only the zone that includes their towns and villages. They will share control with Israel over a second zone, and Israel alone will control the third zone, which encompasses army bases and more than 100 Jewish settlements scattered across the West Bank.

In addition to dividing the West Bank into three zones, the two sides have also defined eight districts. They will open a full-time security coordinating office in each district. When redeployment is completed, Israeli border police and Palestinian police will jointly patrol a dozen West Bank roads on a daily basis.

About 200 Israeli border police fluent in Arabic and English are now completing a course before forming the nucleus of the Israeli side of the joint patrol, Dror said. An additional 600 border police will complete the course in time to fill out the force.

“We learned in Gaza that we should take border police, not conscripted 18- and 19-year-old soldiers, because the border police are more professional, more responsible,” he said. “We are teaching them every word of the agreement, and we are teaching them how to deal with Arabs, how to speak respectfully to Muslims. In Gaza, our troops didn’t have such a course.”

If all goes as planned, this redeployment may produce the separation between average Israelis and Palestinians that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin says is his goal. But it will accomplish that only through close daily cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian security forces and bureaucracies.

The Israeli army says that redeployment may cost as much as $1 billion. Much of that money will be spent on physically separating the West Bank from pre-1967 Israel. Fences are being built to separate Israeli towns that lie inside the pre-1967 armistice line from nearby West Bank Palestinian towns.

Fences also are being built around the more than 100 Jewish settlements that will remain, for now, in the West Bank. Miles of bypass roads are being paved between settlements and pre-1967 Israel, allowing settlers to travel without having to enter Palestinian communities.

But Health Minister Ephraim Sneh said these are relatively minor measures, intended only to give the two sides time to come to trust each other and to believe that this agreement will lead to peaceful coexistence.

“The processes that dominate the world now are of national separation and economic integration,” Sneh said. “People think they have to have their own flag, passport and identity, but they want to erase borders when it comes to trade.”

Since Israel signed the Oslo framework peace accord with the Palestinians in September, 1993, Sneh said, “a process that began in secrecy, with a handful of negotiators, now involves hundreds of people--experts, soldiers, lawyers and others. They are discussing everything from elections to the environment. It is a very good thing, a process of dialogue that will lead us, finally, to find common ground.”